A lesson for all Canadians

Enlarge Image

(DALE CUMMINGS)

The guilty verdicts against three members of a Montreal family in the murders of three teenaged daughters and their step-mother sends a clear a message on this country's tolerance for abhorrent cultural practices that place the lives of women at the whim of a man's distorted sense of honour. Canada can say it has responded in the severest way to the violence that can arise from the offensive values that land here with some newcomers.

Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Yahya and son Hamed Shafia will go to jail for life, with no possibility of parole for 25 years, for the premeditated killings of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti, 13 and Rona Amir Mohammad, their father's other wife. All were drowned, found in a car at the bottom of a canal east of Kingston, Ont., in June, 2009.

The more pressing issue now is how Canada can prevent such tragedies. Having fled Afghanistan in 1992, the Shafias entered Canada in 2007. Their daughters quickly started acting like typical Canadian teens: they had boyfriends, dressed like their friends, rebelled against the strictures of the home.

And they sought the help of teachers, social services workers and police when their father's threats became dangerous. None of the safe harbours, so to speak, was sufficient -- not even the women's shelter where Zainab ran after marrying her boyfriend secretly two weeks before her death.

Canada has tailored the literature and programs it provides immigrants arriving in a liberal, democratic society that protects individual rights, including those of children. The Shafias could not have been ignorant of this. Settlement, however, is not acculturation, the leap to adopt the cultural values of a new society that the older Shafias did not take.

The speed with which this tragic drama played out indicates Canada has to fine tune, as other countries have, the interventions to help families make the shift, and to improve the odds of catching the vulnerable. Rona was treated as an indentured servant, in Canada on a visitor's visa, hiding her relationship to Shafia and did not seek help even though she was abused. Yet she believed Canada's laws would protect her, her sister said: Rona confided to her she heard Shafia and Yahya talking about taking action on the girls but felt safe because this was not Afghanistan.

Each of the daughters had expressed fears or showed signs of being deeply troubled at school. Teachers and officials intervened, called in social services, but none of the young women was apprehended. They changed or recanted their stories, typically while in the presence of their parents. Still, an officer who responded to a 911 call from a neighbour told the trial she challenged Sahar's plea that she needed freedom, pointing to her style of clothing and the makeup she was wearing. Strong-willed Geeti told any authority she could she wanted out of the suffocating grasp of her parents, wanted to live in foster care.

In hindsight, there was a pattern of escalating risk. This is not a lesson for Montreal, but for Canada, which has seen at least a dozen so-called honour killings. Schools, neighbours and state authorities must become more sensitive to signs conflict is becoming dangerous. Prevention means targeting children, and programs that use the wisdom found among immigrant professionals, who can be invaluable resources to all those people within a child's reach.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 31, 2012 A10